No. 9 Furman To Open Play At NCAA Championships Friday

Furman Head Coach Jeff Hull & Alice Chen

May 17, 2017

SUGAR GROVE, Ill. -- The ninth-ranked Furman women's golf team will open play Friday at the 2016 NCAA Championships, which will be contested May 19-24 at the par-72, 6,343 yard Rich Harvest Farms in Sugar Grove, Ill.

The Paladins are set to tee off of No. 10 beginning at 1:36.m. CT and will be playing the opening round in a group that includes No. 8 Duke and No. 11 South Carolina. On Saturday, Furman will tee off at 8:36 a.m. CT from No. 1 and will also play with Oregon and Tennessee.

The Paladins are part of an 24-team field that will play under the NCAA Championship's revised format, which was instituted in 2015. The teams will play 54 holes of stroke play over the course of three days, beginning Friday and continuing through Sunday. The top 15 teams will then play one additional round of stroke play on Monday, May 22. The top eight teams at the end of Monday's round will move into the match-play single elimination bracket. Tuesday will feature the quarterfinals and semifinals, and the finals will be played Wednesday afternoon.

"I am very excited to be in Chicago for the national championships," said Furman head coach Jeff Hull, who was named the 2017 Southern Conference Coach of the Year. "We are having a great time and playing some good golf. We are ready to compete beginning on Friday."

Furman, which secured the Southern Conference's automatic bid to the NCAA Tournament by capturing its 16th SoCon Championship last month at the Country Club of Lexington in Lexington, S.C., finished second last week at the NCAA Lubbock Regional to earn a berth at the NCAA Championship. The Paladins finished 20th at least season's NCAA Championship in Eugene, Ore.

Live scoring of the NCAA Championships will be available at www.golfstat.com or by logging onto www.furmanpaladins.com. The Golf Channel will provide unprecedented prime time coverage of the NCAA Women's Golf Championships. Twelve and a half hours of live event programming will be shown starting on Monday, May 22, and concluding with the match play finals on Wednesday afternoon.